Summary: I thought it was a brilliant idea. I was serving a church in Maine, where Summer Sundays are not the best-attended. The window of good weather is brief, and people want to be in their gardens or at their lakeside camps. That particular summer, I felt motivated to make worship interesting for the ones who did come. For this story from Mark 4, I arranged the text for multiple readers, plus the congregation, with effects designed to put us all in the midst of the storm. I started planning weeks before with a church member who worked with our youth, and he recruited a 13-year-old to help him devise stormy sound effects. They brought a large jug of water to slosh around, amplified by a microphone, and they improvised a thunder sheet. We met the day before with the four readers to practice. At the rehearsal, I liked the thunder sheet so much I decided to incorporate it into my sermon. On Sunday morning, I gave a copy of the manuscript to my sound guys so they would know when to make noise. They practiced again just as worshippers began to arrive, then stepped away while a prelude was played and most of the congregation took their seats. I slipped away to put on my robe, so it was about worship time minus 60 seconds, and I was about to go through door into the sanctuary when the head Deacon for the day stopped me and said someone in the congregation was upset, even angry, about the makeshift thunder sheet. I hadn't stopped to think about whether the particular sounds would be distressing to anyone who might be with us that day. "What? It's too late to change it now!" I said.
